For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
You might have heard of the new term: “woke right.” It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left—what we often refer to as “wokeness”—has come for the right.
Here’s how we think about the dynamic:
Over the past two decades the woke left said: “Everything is taboo”—our Founding Fathers, the idea that men and women are different, the idea that wearing hoop earrings is verboten because it’s cultural appropriation, and on and on.
Naturally, people got fed up. Including people like Bari.
Then some on the right exploited that anger, and said: “Nothing is taboo”—not words like “gay” or “retarded,” but also not “Holocaust revisionism” or “white nationalism.”
Some of this dynamic is playing out in the headlines: The woke left changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Then the White House changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America—the Trump administration even temporarily banned the Associated Press from the White House press room after it continued to publish “the Gulf of Mexico.”
When the woke left tried to change the character of our nation’s founding and take down statues of Winston Churchill and George Washington, the right took down a description of Jackie Robinson’s military service that was on the Department of Defense website because it was too DEI-coded.
And when the woke left said trans, disabled, people of color are the most oppressed class in America, the woke right says white, Christian men are actually at the bottom of the totem pole—creating a new form of identity politics, in right-wing language.
It’s a fascinating and alarming dynamic. The same phenomenon on each side of the political spectrum. We would argue wokeness on the left went totally mainstream.
Rod Dreher is one of the rare voices calling attention to the illiberalism on the right—and the danger it poses. He says the right has a unique opportunity to stop this woke impulse before it metastasizes.
Rod is a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He’s the author of many books including his new bestseller, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. And he most recently wrote in our pages “The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons.”
Bari recently sat down with him to discuss why the woke right tolerates antisemitism and white nationalism, why this movement is appealing to men specifically, if it is fair to equate the woke right with the woke left, why he himself is not even comfortable with the term woke right—we’ll get into that in the conversation—and what happens if this impulse on the right goes mainstream.
This interview was originally a Free Press subscriber-only livestream, and we’re planning to do more of these. If you want to come to one, all you need to do is become a Free Press subscriber today.
Following an unproductive day of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders to discuss a potential deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine. Favreau, Lovett, and Tommy discuss the meetings, the MAGA press corp's bizarre questions for Zelensky, and Trump's latest Putin-inspired fixation—eliminating mail in ballots. Then, they react to Republican governors sending armed troops to DC, ICE saying the quiet part out loud, and Governor Newsom's new social media strategy. To close the show, Bridget Brink, the former United States Ambassador to Ukraine, joins Tommy to talk about Ukraine's reaction to Trump's unusual approach to peace talks.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Journalist and author Seth Harp returns to the pod to talk about his horrifying and expansive new book The Fort Bragg Cartel. We talk with Seth about America’s forever-war machine and the global drug empire it empowers, with a special focus on the case of Delta Force officer William Lavigne, who killed his best friend before turning up dead near Fort Bragg in a still-unsolved murder. We also discuss the rise of JSOC, the third Iraq War and its ongoing ramifications, the US military’s ties with the brutal Los Zetas cartel, and the eternal shadow war waged in the name of empire.
Buy Seth’s book here (and give it 5 stars on Amazon!): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bragg-cartel-by-seth-harp/
And follow him on X at @sethharpesq
Today on The Gist, the Texas Democrats’ walk-out, a dramatic gesture that ultimately did little because they never had the leverage to win. From there he zooms out to Europe, where far-right parties are suddenly topping polls in France, the UK, and now Germany. Historian Katja Hoyer joins to explain what’s behind the AFD’s rise and why calling them “Nazis” isn’t scaring voters away the way it once did. In the spiel, Trump meets Putin in a summit that’s long on spectacle but pretty short on substance, which may be exactly how both of them like it. Produced by Corey Wara
The organ transplant is a modern medical miracle that saves lives, but it is losing critical public confidence. Now Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling for reforms.array(3) {
[0]=>
string(20) "https://www.tpr.org/"
[1]=>
string(0) ""
[2]=>
string(1) "0"
}
On Thursday the San Antonio City Council will vote on competing paths on Project Marvel. Mayor Jones joined TPR's The Source to explain why she wants the council to wait before agreeing to a term sheet agreement with The Spurs organization.
Militarizing the nation's capital is not a distraction, and Democrats really need to stop using that term. Trump is trying to seize power, intimidate the public, and foment violence in the streets. And it's a purposeful MAGA marketing campaign—the masked federal thugs often have a camera person with them as they tase and tackle people. This is a fight that is central to the pro-democracy coalition, and it must become a political loser for Trump. Meanwhile, European leaders are now the ones defending liberty, and Trump may be laying the groundwork for an attempted federal takeover of our elections.
In a letter sent Aug. 12, three White House officials told the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III, that the administration would conduct a review at certain Smithsonian museums.
In this installment of our politics series, “If You Can Keep It,” we talk about how the administration is injecting itself into the affairs – and the exhibits – of the Smithsonian Institution and what that means for our understanding of our shared history.
Recorded just days after Trump sent the National Guard into DC, civil rights lawyer, author of Copaganda, & co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law Alec Karakatsanis returns to Bad Faith alongside Worth Rises executive director Bianca Tylek, leading expert and author of The Prison Industry: How it Works and Who Profits, to explain the bigger picture of how the private prison lobby is driving the crackdown on immigrants, the rise in cop cities, and creeping authoritarianism in the United States.
